Exploring the Space of the Ending (Part 3)

Coming back to the fine-tuning mode revision of a manuscript's closing pages after a weekend off from looking at it

This post is continued from parts one and two. I wasn’t expecting to keep blogging in this mode but hopefully the thinking aloud about my process during a very specific part of drafting might be useful, or at least worth recording.

Stayed away from my manuscript throughout the weekend in while having a guest in town. Felt glad to not look at it after slowly inching it toward where I want it to be even if I still hadn’t quite felt the sense of completion that would warrant freedom. Having gotten much closer across the week, however, I found myself doting less and not resorting to thinking about what else might be missing as a brainstorming mechanism while away.

Today I came back to the same place where I’d started reading last time and immediately noticed that the landscape of the prose felt far more firm than I remembered. Megan and I had talked a bit recently about how sometimes you can just tell whether a text is interesting by looking at the shape of it on the page, and I did get the sense that some of that energy had manifested in my ending, though I knew it still needed legwork to carry that sensation over on a sentence level.